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Maggie Brooks (NY-25) coming on strong against Louise Slaughter

Maggie Brooks (NY-25) coming on strong against Louise Slaughter

With two weeks until Election Day, Operation Counterweight in Upstate New York is approaching its home stretch. Below is an update for the 25th district in NY, where Maggie Brooks is challenging long-term Democratic incumbent Louise slaughter.

Roll Call rates it lean Democrat, but the only public polling shows that Brooks has cut Slaughters lead in half since the conventions from 10 to 5 points as of two weeks ago.  Please consider helping Maggie Brooks pull off the upset with a last-push donation.

As before, this analysis were prepared by a Cornell student who wishes to remain anonymous.

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Facing an uphill fight against 14-term Incumbent Louise Slaughter, Maggie Brooks has been giving Slaughter her first real challenge since the 1980s. This district is likely to support Obama by a solid margin, but Brooks definitely still has a chance to pull off the upset.

After turning down six opportunities to debate Maggie Brooks, Slaughter finally agreed to a debate two and a half weeks before election day. Fittingly, Slaughter had just received campaign support from by Bill Clinton and Sandra Fluke. Slaughter has been running campaign ads like a hyperventilating incumbent and it shows in the spiral of negativity engulfing Monroe County. The DCCC even created countyofcorruption.com to go with Slaughter’s attacks on Brooks’ husband and her Mediscare attack ads.

Brooks has been fighting back, however, and she’s even successfully filed a complaint with the Fair Election Practice Committee, which ruled a NYS Democratic Committee mailer accusing Brooks of corruption as “overblown or outright false.” The mailer echoes the same attacks Slaughter has been repeatedly trying to use against Brooks.

Although Slaughter has an impenetrable lead within the city of Rochester itself, the new district has pushed out from the city in ways that favor Brooks. As independent polling from mid-October shows, Brooks holds a 50-43 lead in the non-Rochester parts of Monroe County, where she currently serves as County Executive. Slaughter does hold a 5 point lead, but given September polling that showed Brooks down by double-digits, this race has shown positive movement for Brooks.

Ironically, Slaughter has tried to claim that Brooks held a major fundraising advantage through the help of Super-PAC spending and “corporate interest groups”, despite the fact that, according to public filings, her campaign has spent four times that of Brooks.

The fundraising data shows that half of Slaughter’s $1.8 million in fundraising came from PACs outside of the state, whereas only about a sixth of Brooks’ $1.2 million came from PACs. Even if Brooks manages to pull ahead in fundraising by election day, Slaughter’s ability to fundraise shows that the perks of incumbency are much too ignored by the anti-Super PAC crowd.

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Comments

franciscodanconia | October 24, 2012 at 11:49 am

I’ll hold my nose and vote for Brooks, although it’s time for Slaughter to take a hike.

Hopefuly the Louise Macintosh Slaughter High Speed Choo Choo, all 11 miles of it, never materializes.